Embodiments of the present invention are directed to user interfaces and more particularly to techniques for providing user interface representing hierarchy information.
In today's information age, an increasing amount of data is being collected and stored every second. Satellites orbiting earth record information and photograph our planet everyday, and they send information and photographs back to earth. Millions of computers on the Internet collect all types of information, ranging from network usage to marketing data. All types of organizations, large and small, store information such as personnel data, operational costs, etc. New tools are being invented to make collecting data easier, faster, and more convenient than ever before.
Data, no matter how it is collected, is only meaningful and useful to people when logically organized and stored. For example, computers often rely on data structures to store data in predefined fields. For large amounts of data, people usually rely on databases, where structured collections of data and/or records are stored in computer systems in accordance to predefined rules and/or database models.
Relationship models, hierarchy models, and network models, are common models for use in representing relationships among entities of information stored in databases. Typically, a database relies on database software to organize and manage data and/or entities of information. For example, database software organizes and stores data and/or records using various types of database models.
Graphical user interface (“GUI”) is a helpful way for displaying data and showing the relationships thereof. Numerous conventional graphical user interfaces are capable of displaying records from a database in a hierarchical view. For example, Oracle Corporation offers many software tools for displaying organization charts in a hierarchical view, the organization chart being a representation of data selected from a database. For example, nodes representing entities and links representing relationships among these entities are displayed as a hierarchical chart on a GUI. Unfortunately, merely displaying hierarchical information using conventional techniques is inadequate for many applications.
Therefore, new and improved graphical user interfaces for displaying hierarchical information are desired.